Disobedience is a Virtue: On Goliarda Sapienza’s “The Art of Joy”

In 1976, when the Italian author Goliarda Sapienza finished writing “The Art of Joy,” a nearly seven-hundred-page novel, now considered her best work, it was too shocking—or, possibly, too long—to attract a publisher. For twenty years, or so the story goes, this weird, unwieldy epic rested in a chest, until, after Sapienza’s death, in 1996, her husband published it at his own expense. Few people noticed. Then, in 2008, a translation inspired some enthusiasm in France (always fond of erotic literature), and the flattered Italians put out another edition. Last June, citing “rapidly increasing” interest in the book, the University of London held an academic conference on Sapienza; an English translation was due out a month later. I asked an Italian friend if she had heard of the dead writer. She had not. But, she said, with that name—goliardico means irreverent, carefree, bohemian; sapienza is wisdom—the woman was obviously a hippy.

Sapienza was named for her brother, Goliardo, who died before she was born, but, in addition to being a tribute to their son, the name must have signified her parents’ wish for the kind of person their daughter would become. Sapienza’s mother, Maria Giudice, was a well-known socialist organizer and journalist. Her father—Giudice’s second husband, the socialist lawyer Giuseppe Sapienza—pulled his daughter from school to protect her mind from the Fascist curriculum. Sapienza’s subsequent education took place in the political and intellectual bohemia of her own home and in the outside world, which her parents encouraged her to explore. She played the piano, learned to weave, sewed costumes for marionettes, and acted. When she was sixteen, her mother took her to Rome, to study theatre at the Reale Accademia d’Arte Drammatica. A few years later, she fought alongside her father in the anti-Fascist resistance. In the forties, she fell in love with the neorealist director Citto Maselli, who cast her in some of his movies, and, in the fifties, she turned to writing full time. Things did not go especially well. She overdosed on sleeping pills in 1962, underwent a course of electroshock therapy at a clinic in Rome, began psychoanalysis, and fell in love with her analyst, who responded by terminating the treatment. She attempted suicide a second time, in 1964. Her first two novels, “Lettera Aperta” (1967) and “Il Filo di Mezzogiorno” (1969), have been described as attempts to reconstruct the memories destroyed by the electroshock. “The Art of Joy,” which took ten years to write, amounted, at least publicly, in her lifetime, to nothing. In 1980, very poor, she was jailed for stealing jewelry from a friend, an event recounted in two more autobiographical novels. The four published books brought Sapienza some recognition, but never fame or wealth. Married but childless, she supported herself in the last years of her life by teaching acting at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

A triumphant account of a resourceful woman, the carefree and wise “The Art of Joy” lives up to the optimism of its author’s name where Sapienza herself may not have. Perhaps, for Sapienza, there was something aspirational about the spiritual heroism of her main character; certainly, there is something pedagogical. As its title suggests, “The Art of Joy” is unashamedly a novel of instruction. In its heady illustration of female freedom, it belongs to what might be called the secular-wisdom literature of personal liberation, with countercultural heroes we’re meant to emulate: those of “The Immoralist,” “Siddhartha,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Dharma Bums,” “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” The characters of these books are exemplary for their disobedience, their flouting of convention for the sake of fulfillment or truth. But the book that may have been too indecent to find success in the nineteen-seventies today faces a public more unshockable than prudish. Secular-wisdom lit has fallen out of fashion, come to seem naïve. We’re more comfortable with the cautionary tale—the corrupt person, the failed marriage, the bad decision—or with no instruction at all. Perhaps we assume the negative example to be realistic, while suspecting the exemplary one of falseness.

The critical depiction of conventional middle-class life—the “Babbit”- or “Madame Bovary”-style story—is still probably the most common kind of “literary” novel. It asks the reader to judge (and to pity) its characters rather than to admire them and, by implication, to beware their emptiness, shallowness, contradiction. But the novel that exposes the triviality and hypocrisy of middle-class life, together with the impossibility of its transcendence, is so commonplace that it has become nihilistic. Everything is shit, it says, and now that everyone understands this and can give a cynical rather than a pious account of our actions, we go on doing the same shit. It may be, in our climate of passive disenchantment, that it’s the apparently affirmative depiction of what’s not shit that possesses a critical function. At least Sapienza’s distinctive narrator—prickly and perverse, her virtues appealingly un-obvious—makes a case for the charm, and the use, of such heroism.

What exactly the art of joy consists of isn’t immediately evident. At the outset, the novel reads less like a handbook on happiness than like a sadomasochistic Italian novelization of “The Joy of Sex.” It opens with a girl, called Modesta, who is born in 1900, in Sicily, to modest circumstances and immodest predilections, masturbating to the screams of a resented disabled sister, whom Modesta fantasizes is deliberately rending her own flesh. Masturbation gives way to cunnilingus by a tall neighbor boy, which gives way to intercourse, with Modesta’s deflowering, at the age of nine, by a stranger who claims to be her father. Perhaps the “joy” part hasn’t begun yet. But, wait, she rather likes it, at least until he sticks “something hard … into the hole where the pee-pee came out.” Immediately after the rape, the family’s hut goes up in flames, the casualty of a fire that Modesta has lit accidentally/on purpose. The worst casualties are Modesta’s sister and mother, locked in a bedroom by the prodigal father. Modesta has a chance to unlock them; she does not take it. The father is gone for good. Dispatched to a convent, this “poor tormented child,” as the nuns gullibly call her, fakes seizures in order to secure the comforting bosom of the Mother Superior, Leonora, who likes to titillate herself and her charge with stories of the persecuted Saint Agatha. Her bosom, St. Agatha’s was torn from her chest with “red-hot forceps” and “arranged … warm and tremulous, on a silver tray.” The lurid description gives Modesta “a thrill of pleasure” “so intense and protracted” that she has to grit her teeth to avoid a cry. When she discovers that the nun won’t put out—Leonora ventures only a “few timid caresses” and punishes Modesta for having witnessed her masturbating—infatuation turns to anger. “I hate her, I hate her,” she shrieks, alone in her cell, then brings herself to orgasm. All this before Modesta has reached the age of eighteen, and the book a tenth of its length.

What kind of teachings are these? After Modesta has left the convent, Beatrice, a young princess, seduces her with a game of wet nurse and baby. Soon after, Beatrice’s estate-manager father, Carmine, tutors Modesta in that key sub-category to the art of joy, the art of orgasm. For a time, Beatrice and Modesta share the affections of the young intellectual Carlo, whose skills, alas, don’t measure up to Carmine’s. “Love is not a miracle, Carlo,” Modesta advises.“It’s an art, a skill, a mental and physical exercise of the mind and of the senses like any other. Like playing an instrument, dancing or woodworking.”

The practical comment, delivered matter-of-factly, embodies the common-sense attitude toward sex, and personal development, that runs throughout the book. Among the novel’s remarkable qualities is an easy way of asserting the unremarkableness, the ordinariness, of transgressive desire. An incestuous aura enfolds many of the sexual relationships. Beatrice, Modesta’s first female lover, is the bastard child of Mother Leonora, her first female crush, who entered the convent because she had illegitimately conceived with Carmine, the orgasm expert. Modesta sleeps not only with Carmine but also, later, with his son Mattia, who goes on to live with (but, in another unconventional turn, not to marry) the daughter of his half-sister Beatrice—in other words, his niece. Modesta’s son by Carmine, Prando, fathers a child with the woman who was, for many years, his nurse, and whose beauty Modesta also admires. Modesta’s enviable sexual self-possession is matched by her singular determination. She has a knack for canny, sometimes violent gambles. Post-convent, she’s packed off to the estate of the rich, aristocratic Brandiforti, a family to which Modesta gains permanent entry by working the apparent miracle of “taming” the “thing”: Gaia Brandiforte’s feral, mentally disabled son, who, after a little affection, becomes Modesta’s devoted pet. At Gaia’s request (but by her own design), Modesta marries the man, shrewdly positioning herself to take the matriarch’s place when she dies. Gaia’s death is soon given a nudge by Modesta herself, who, when her mother-in-law falls ill with the Spanish flu, fails to rush to her bedside with the necessary pills. It all works beautifully. Modesta wins the benefits of marriage—money, a title, and a cover for her indecencies—and avoids any of the burden. Just eighteen, she has engineered for herself a handful of rare freedoms: liberty without loneliness, money without work, and sex with whomever she wants.

Modesta’s barbarous genius is to refuse to be thwarted, no matter the obstacle. The novel’s length depends, in part, on the comparable tenacity of its author, who sets out to articulate the full course of Modesta’s impressive and virtuous intellectual development, from her first stirrings of atheism, inside the convent, to her autodidactic joyride through the Brandiforti library (where she reads Voltaire, August Bebel, and Diderot), her socialist apprenticeship via Carlo, her brief preoccupation with poetry—she vows not to write any more poems until she can prove to herself “that it was for fun and only for fun”—and, finally, her career as a writer and political speaker, which, though it is “the most exciting pursuit that she had ever experienced,” she nobly leaves as soon as she finds herself corrupted by a desire for glory. Her interests are as polymorphously perverse as her desires, and her lovers seem chosen partly for their ability to school her in radical thought. Gradually, Modesta gathers around her an elective family (Modesta’s only biological bond is to her son Prando) that resists the dominant mores. She helps to raise Beatrice and Carlo’s daughter, and accepts as her own the son fathered by her disabled husband with his female companion. Alongside her own children flourish those of the groundskeeper, the servant, and the nurse. In this loving, heterogeneous clan—governed by its members’ voluntary allegiance to Modesta’s powerful but never despotic authority—the young people put on plays and argue politics, Joyce finds asylum from Fascist persecution, and Modesta, whenever she’s feeling down, needs only turn to whomever is at her side to hear her praises sung. (Her children and her lovers alike often marvel at her beauty and, into her middle age, her youthfulness.)

It isn’t all joy. In the course of the book’s fifty-odd years, some of Modesta’s dearest companions are killed by Fascists, others fall ill, Joyce repeatedly attempts suicide, a world war begins, Modesta herself is imprisoned for political reasons, and one of her sons goes off to fight. Sapienza lets in this reality, however, mainly so that her heroine can escape it. The date of Modesta’s birth—the first day of the first month of 1900, about halfway between the year of Sapienza’s mother’s birth, in 1880, and her own, in 1924—signals the character’s symbolic status. Her modernness and freeness accentuate the era’s backwardness and unfreedom. She is an anachronism, a bright corrective to dark history. In the lesson of what to do right when so much has gone wrong, disobedience is virtue, and an irrepressible masturbator and murderer is an exemplary figure.

All of the fucking in “The Art of Joy” could put it in a class with “Story of O” or “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” But Sapienza’s novel is about sex only insofar as an account of a woman’s artistic, intellectual, and political maturation must include her sexual career. Or, better, the discovery of pleasure initiates Modesta’s appetite more generally—for knowledge, for experience, for autonomy. It turns her outward, toward nonsexual things, by inwardly sustaining her. Her childish sadism is less sexual than it is basically libidinal: her erotic interest in her sister’s or St. Agatha’s pain, or the way in which her hatred of Leonora transmutes into arousal—these are signs of an exultant urge to live. “The real way of living is to answer to one’s wants,” D. H. Lawrence says in a letter (written, incidentally, from Italy). “I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub and have a good time, I want to look abeastly swell today, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult that man.” Modesta’s anger is at once a natural response to constraint and a positive impulse on its own. For Sapienza, fury and lust issue from the same source, and are equally worthy of expression.

Despite her emphasis on the pleasures of the body, however, Sapienza’s style is strikingly abstracted. She avoids physical description, and much of the novel is in dialogue—rambling and prolix, with few quotation marks and scant context. Pivotal moments frequently occur offstage to be reconstructed through various clues dropped into conversation. “The Art of Joy” is not an artful book or, rather, it is artful only in a paradoxical way: this is the art of the natural and the spontaneous. Sapienza considered herself an “ideological writer,” as her husband notes in his introduction to the English edition—“unfairly,” he thinks. She wrote for “pure, unbiased readers” like herself (he seems to mean down-to-earth and unsnobbish), and tested the story over the many years of its composition by every day reading sections aloud to a close friend. He also suggests that Sapienza’s talents exceed her politics. Really, it’s her politics—feminist, socialist, anti-Fascist, libertine—that are her talent.

Because to talk of “the art” of anything implies that it needs to be learned, it can seem strange that this hortatory book takes as its main character a woman whose important qualities are inborn rather than acquired. Modesta is natively shameless and willful; she doesn’t need to study these traits. Her remarkably durable beauty is out of her hands. Her most extraordinary characteristic, her instinctive obedience to her desires, is also her most ordinary. But this is the point. Modesta’s drives belong to all of us—only in her they are relentless, even thuggish. Sapienza’s politics of undifferentiated liberation can be criticized as simplistic (does the freedom ever have a cost?), as can her literary art. Except that this book’s crudeness is exactly its strength. There is a necessary vulgarity to utopian thinking: it’s impossible to pinpoint the thing you want that isn’t yet here. And who can deny the allure of these fine tips? Marry a rich dimwit who can’t control you. Be a socialist. (Or an anarchist.) Fight the Fascists. Surround yourself with children whom you let run free. If you’re in prison, take a lover; but don’t let any lover imprison you.

“The Art of Joy” is too long, often awkward, sometimes tedious, flawed like its heroine. Yet, also like her, it’s worth emulating: it’s a novel about how to live instead of how not to, and we could use more of those.